Archive for June 2nd, 2012

Deep in the bowels of a pristine New Mexico cave, microbiologists have discovered nearly a hundred types of bacteria that can fight off modern antibiotic drugs.

The bacteria coat the walls of the Lechuguilla cave system on rock faces some 487 meters below Earth’s surface. Until recently, the microscopic life-forms had encountered neither humans nor modern antibiotics.

That’s because a thick dome of rock isolated the cave between four and seven million years ago. Any water that trickles through takes roughly ten thousand years to reach the cave’s depths—which means the subterranean life has existed entirely in the absence of modern medicine.

While not infectious to humans (fortunately), the cave bacteria can resist multiple classes of antibiotics, including new synthetic drugs. The discovery serves as an intriguing lead in the quest to understand how drug-resistant diseases emerge. Learn more here.